What do you like best about the product?

Starwind Virtual SAN (VSAN) is installed on two of my Production servers for use in a Hyper-V cluster for a few years. Starwind support was excellent in setting up all the connections between the servers and doing the configuration. Performance has been excellent with no issues. I don't even notice it's there.

What do you dislike about the product?

I haven't had any negative experiences with this product so far. Ensure that you have your hardware tested and configured so that the virtual SAN can run properly. However, Starwind support was able to point me in the right direction for the configuration of the network environment and ensured that my setup was correct.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We have critical applications, that required high availability. With our previous implementation the system was cumbersome, The instant failover feature was a key requirement for the business, ensuring that the systems we relied on was always available.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

If like me your organisation has a need to maintain high availability on critical applications and you want an easy to manage option Starwind VSAN is for you

What do you like best about the product?

vSAN allows us to provide more options to our clients to make their networks more resilient without forking out the price of a physical SAN.

What do you dislike about the product?

Although it is a more affordable option than a physical SAN, it is still quite expensive for some of our smaller clients.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

They enable us to create failover clusters for our smaller 2 host clients that usually would only have replication but no live migration.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

If a one stop virtual SAN is what you're after, look no further!

What do you like best about the product?

Stability of the app and the easyness to restart the nodes of contact them.

What do you dislike about the product?

There's a little documentation which is not that easy to find.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It keeps the system alive and is a secure way to have some more redundancy.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Great product and superb support from scratch to operational VSAN

What do you like best about the product?

The VSAN just works. Being new to the organization and to StarWind, I found the system easy and intuitive. The support, community, and KB articles online work to make this a great product.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing! I honestly haven't found anything that I don't care for. If I had to pick something, perhaps more recent video tutorials would fit the bill here.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our electronic medical record runs on a 2-node hyper-converged cluster, with StarWind running it. This helps increase our uptime, fault tolerance and reliability for the EMR.

What do you like best about the product?

What we like best about it, is that's the only true two node Hyper-V cluster solution that's available. On both produciton locations we have a 2-node setup over 2 different Server room.
Our main goal was that we want to have all VM servers available on one Cluster host ,in case of a disaster in one of our server rooms.
Microsoft SSD (Storage Space Direct) always needs a 3rd witness (SMB or Cloud) but in our a two node solution this is not ideal. Direct connected fiber connections
between the nodes makes everything fast and makes the chance of a Cluster split-brain fault less likely.

What do you dislike about the product?

I can not think of anything that I dislike about the product.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are using a Starwind Virtual SAN (VSAN) on two Production locations with a Hyper-V Cluster for almost 5 years now.
It has given us very good performance and haven't got any issue with it the past years.
Starwind support is excellent, very fast and have very good knowledge of the Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software.
It can be supported by a small IT Staff

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Yes it a great product for a HA environment.

What do you like best about the product?

efficient, stable and easy to use, ... all this quality reduce maintenance/configuration time

What do you dislike about the product?

I can not think of anything that I dislike about the product.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Providing HA storage for very attractive price

What do you like best about the product?

They provide good support and their response is quick, Interface is admin friendly. SAN works fast, even with HDDs . Not much maintenance is needed, just install and run updates sometimes.

What do you dislike about the product?

As I've mentioned above, their support is quick, but it is a little expensive in my opinion. I really recommend working with their support when you first build a Virtual SAN.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Well , there is no need for us to buy a separate physical shared storage, we can just use storage on hypervisor servers instead, you can also save on MS licenses.

What do you like best about the product?

Value for money
Easy to Manage
Agnostic Software

What do you dislike about the product?

Some security features missing. The alerting should be improved

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Datacenter Uptime
Datacenter Availability
Meets low budget requirements

Recommendations to others considering the product:

We have been runing Starwind Vurtual San in a production enviroment since 2009 with vmware.
We run all types of software on top of Starwind (Diferent types of Database, factory software, security software, ERP...).

What do you like best about the product?

We are an SMB that can't be bothered paying tens of thousands of dollars just to get a proper HA storage for a two node failover cluster.
Therefore StarWind's vSAN was financially attractive from the start.
The reviews you can find all over the web incentivised us to research this solution deeper (e.g. just check all the great posts vom Kooler on Stackoverflow), leading to us actually implementing it.

We were coming from an S2D implementation which already gave us a ridiculous amount of headaches (bugs, performance stalls, "we know what's best for you" automatisms) IN ADDITION to being slow af AND annoying to administrate/debug WHILE ALSO having the most annoying documentation ever to be created by mankind. Just the usual MS crap basically. Rush out some code and ship it and never fix anything (but break it every few weeks with patches)...

The initial tests were easily implementable (without begging some sales folks for a POC, due to a free version being available) as well as proper documentation *that you actually LIKE to read due to it having been typed by a tech* (and that also isn't behind a pay/registration wall).
As close to perfect as the documentation is, do read the blog posts to e.g. the 2 node HA setup as well - some minute details were only found in those.
No showstoppers, and not many things in general, just a few hints here and there.

The install itself is easy as pie, the config file is properly documented (you can do most things via GUI, just some things are set in the main config file).
Do help yourself to the iSCSI Powershell commands (Windows defaults from MS) when implementing, way more attractive than clicking via GUI!
(New-IscsiTargetPortal, Connect-IscsiTarget etc.)

Some things must be done via GUI though, since iSCSI has been implemented way back and "making scripting available" wasn't that widespread for developers back then.
This being a Microsoft topic, not StarWind though...they would have had to make their very own iSCSI implementation otherwise.

For testing you should use a proper tool like https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/manage/diskspd-overview
since "Windows copy from within the VM running on the test setup" can be flakey.
Not as in "the results aren't valid real world performance if you check with the Windows copy within a VM" but rather "non-scientific", since you can't extract much data from that process aside from size/time.

Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a...lets call it "planned disaster"...feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline.
Atm (20220609) this is still necessary, since taking a node offline without properly activating maintenance mode on the vSAN would trigger a full sync of the vSAN nodes.
This is fine and a good thing! since it ensures data integrity. But there is something in the making that would ensure integrity without a full sync after a node goes down...which, as stated above, one could "abuse" to patch (and boot = take down) the hypervisors during business hours 😁

Other than that the thing is rock stable and chugging along without issues.
Like I said we are an SMB so we "only" have around 50 VMs on our FO cluster, which is a medium load for SSDs.
So if you plan to go more to the "max" side of performance use, do proper testing!

Price-wise this is very attractive, the support is great (little that we needed due to the good docs) and I would expect you to reach very good performance just like we did.
The next-best solution from my research back then - that you would actually want to use, so no S2D crap or anything - would have started at 7x or 8x the price. Started! So...since StarWind's solution has served us very well over the last two years already...you get who I would recommend 😎

MIT

PS: We don't like to publicly post as our corp (privacy reasons), but take me posting here at all as an additional hint to at least check out the product. I wouldn't bother if it sucked... 😏

PPS: There is a visual bug with a specific part of iSCSI.
Microsoft's fault, as usual has never been fixed in over 15 years.
Just don't panic if you experience it, "all is well"... 😂
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/de-de/000138339/microsoft-iscsi-initiator-source-ip-address-incorrect-in-persistent-target-or-favorite-targets-details
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/d10d87c9-7361-4f0a-8ffe-5c877e6f209d/208-iscsi-initiator-source-ip-incorrect-in-persistent-target-details?forum=winserverfiles

What do you dislike about the product?

Since you are relying on Microsofts implementation of iSCSI...should MS decide to break it with a patch, that's that 😁
And since iSCSI has been around for so long, not everything is powershellable.

For StarWind's product itself though, apart from an upcoming feature (mentioned above) we aren't missing anything and since the GUI is proper I really don't dislike anything since implementing it.
Which is a REALLY rare thing for a sysadmin nowadays 😍

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Providing HA storage for a FO cluster

What do you like best about the product?

After deploying a HA SQL Failover Cluster, we started to notice performance issues due to our storage, which was an off the shelf NAS.
I had already heard about StarWind and its VSAN software so I decided to run a little test environment. I was pleasantly surprised by the performance gains even on spinning disks and the overall setup being fairly painless.
I decided to go ahead with this solution, got the cost signed off and implemented it in production.
We had some initial issues but their support was extremely helpful in resolving these and was very patient as we deployed this to a secure environment with no internet access. Yet they still offered support and worked closely with a single point of contact.
I then later moved to a different company and implement a similar solution in the Oracle Cloud using their free offering, again this was simple to setup using their collection of PowerShell scripts.

What do you dislike about the product?

The forums can lead to many dead threads without any resolutions.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We had issue with our internal warehouse system, that ran off a SQL Failover Cluster. We found the issue was caused by slow disk performance and StarWind removed these.